Biden’s Labor Secretary Signals He’ll Fight for Gig Worker Employment

Marty Walsh says “in a lot of cases” gig workers should be employees.

Abaca Press/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In an exclusive interview with Reuters today, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said that, “in a lot of cases,” gig workers should be reclassified as employees rather than independent contractors. As employees, gig workers would get a full slate of benefits: the ability to organize a union, sick time, health care, and a minimum wage guarantee.

It’s a potential blow to a suite of tech companies that operate as “platforms” for workers. Shares of DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft plummeted after the interview was published.

Still, it’s not clear what this might mean. Walsh told Reuters he’d be speaking with companies to make sure gig workers receive “all of the things that an average employee in American can access.” Walsh is a member of a new group within the Biden administration, headed by Vice President Kamala Harris, looking broadly at labor rights. (Politico recently reported that gig companies are targeting the task force in their lobbying efforts.)

The note of qualified support isn’t necessarily surprising coming from Walsh. The PRO Act, a major Democratic agenda item, includes what’s called an “ABC test” for employment. This test would clearly make gig workers employees, not independent contractors. In his speech before Congress on Wednesday, President Joe Biden spoke of passing the PRO Act in the broader context of restructuring the economy to emphasize union jobs. Late in the Trump administration, the Labor Department announced a new measure that would have changed the Fair Labor Standards Act to give gig companies more freedom to not employ their workers; Walsh’s department nixed it before he was appointed.

Still, some worried that Biden’s hiring of Seth Harris as a labor adviser suggested the administration wasn’t planning to put up much of a fight. Harris is responsible for some of the intellectual scaffolding around the gig economy; in a 2015 paper, he proposed a third category of worker—one with certain labor rights but not full employment. Talk of a “third way” has suited the needs of Uber and Lyft in their pursuit of beating down employment organizing efforts. There’s also the recent history of Democrats playing footsie with the tech industry. Former Obama administration apparatchiks went on to jobs at Amazon (Jay Carney) and Uber (David Plouffe).

Moreover, there was the bummer of Prop 22. Even though ABC is used across labor law in many states, the test came to wider notice in 2019 during debates over California’s Assembly Bill 5. Groups rallied against the test (often, as I’ve written, in confusing ways). Gig companies responded with a multimillion-dollar campaign to stop themselves from having to employ their workers in the form of a ballot initiative. When Proposition 22 passed, some Democrats took that as a call to back off.

One of the sole Democrats voicing opposition to the PRO Act, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, has singled out backlash to the ABC test in California as a problem. In explaining why “there are parts of the PRO Act” that have caused him “concerns,” Warner noted that “the overwhelmingly majority of Californians rose up” against the ABC test in California. 

As California discovered, the gig economy puts up fierce resistance to any attempt at regulation. During the last few years, Uber in particular has ramped up its lobbying efforts. In 2020, Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general and adviser to President Donald Trump, was keeping busy not only rallying support to “stop the steal” but also lobbying on Uber’s behalf. A month ago, her lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, hired a top aide to Walsh.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate